Parents Push Back : School Street Patrol Keeps Dealers Away

When Southeast residents living near King Elementary School marched in August to protest gang members and drug pushers hanging around the campus periphery, many chalked it up as just another one-day spasm of emotion, without long-lasting effect.

They didn’t count on the determination and enthusiasm of school artist Eddie Edwards and new Principal Dennis Doyle.

The pair have harnessed long-simmering anger among most residents against pushers who for years practically bowled over students in trying to be first to sell drugs to drivers who screech up in their cars from nearby California 94. Even those students not in the way often were forced to watch the dealers fight among themselves over sales and listen to harsh language used in transactions, Edwards said.

Now, more than 30 parents and supportive community residents take turns donning orange vests and standing on one of the six street intersections at the sprawling campus, silently intimidating the “bad element” in the immediate area. City police have beefed up their own patrols and respond immediately to calls for help, Doyle said.

As pushers retreat from the streets near King Elementary, the school’s 1,000 students are learning that gangs and drugs are not an inevitable way of life, Doyle said.

Parents are beginning to trust Doyle when he says that the school wants to make a difference for their children, and teachers are becoming more comfortable now that they have a less-threatening environment in which to work.

Wednesday evening, the school celebrated its newfound sense of purpose with a community picnic on a new grass playground, a joint effort of the school district and the city of San Diego that makes King one of only a handful of schools with grass fields.

But nobody is pretending that the goal of excellence for an inner-city school will be easy.

“You’ve got to crawl before you can walk,” said Vera Hamilton, a retired resident who has volunteered to stand guard at the corner of 32nd Street and Island Avenue every day----a corner where she said pushers formerly gathered in small crowds, right in front of her house.

She can still feel the icy stare of pushers who have moved halfway down the block away from King, north on 32nd toward Market Street.

“But I’m protecting the children and we’ve made things better for kids,” Hamilton said. “You don’t have (drugs) being sold on every corner now. We’re sending a message for our children that (drugs) don’t have to be the norm.”

Anita Stinton, who has a child attending King, feels an even stronger duty to monitor a corner, sometimes wheeling her infant daughter along.

“We’ve got parents coming to school for the first time with their kids, telling me to ‘have a nice day,’ and one little boy even brought me a flower last week to thank me,” Stinton said. “And things are starting to build more and more. Now I’ve got another parent out here helping me.”

Doyle said that last week, on the corner of 31st and Island, where dealers once held sway, he “actually saw kids throwing a football back and forth. I think that’s great!”

Doyle credits Edwards, a local artist who works with children on school murals and other art projects, for following up on the anti-drug march.

“He and the other parents have been courageous enough to make a statement,” Doyle said.

Edwards, a Spring Valley resident who attended King (formerly Stockton Elementary) as a child, said his own anger gradually peaked after seeing the dealers day after day, no matter which way he looked from the school.

“It’s so intimidating to teachers, to parents, to students, it creates a terrible climate,” Edwards said. “I said we can’t keep taking this, especially because people in the community are just as disgusted as anyone else.”

Edwards organized a telephone tree of interested parents and, with the help of Doyle, arranged meetings with police and community activists such as Councilman-elect George Stevens, who told how his neighbors in the city’s Emerald Hills district organized to chase pushers away.

The meetings helped break down stereotypes between Latino parents, who felt all blacks were “pushers,” and blacks, who saw all Latinos as “wetbacks,” said Edwards, who is black.

“At first, everyone was afraid, because some felt that to stand up on a corner was to risk getting shot,” Edwards said. “But gradually, we got people because we realized we’ll never stop this unless we ourselves stop people from preying on our own families, our own neighborhoods. . . . We need to make dealers feel guilty about what they are doing, that they’ve got to feel like they’re child molesters when they deal like this.”

The patrols are only a first step, Edwards and Doyle emphasized.

“Some of these pushers are victims as well,” Edwards said. “A lot sell just to get enough money to get drugs, and they don’t like what they’re doing but they can’t stop.

“Some of them have kids going to school here” but use their money to buy drugs so that the school ends up worrying about how the children are getting fed, he said.

Schools alone can’t cope with parental problems, drugs and student performance, but they could do more, Doyle said.

Using a United Way grant, 40 parents are being trained in how to direct residents to social service agencies able to help. In the school auditorium, professional trainers play the role of a social service employee talking by phone to a person needing help, showing the residents how to cut through bureaucratic red tape and language.

King now sponsors the Parent Institute, a series of seminars to show parents how to understand what goes on at schools, to encourage them to visit regularly and what to look for in a classroom, to talk with teachers and to work better with their children on homework.

More than 170 parents have shown up for these night meetings, unheard of in past years when few would venture out after dark for anything being held at the school.

“Dennis knows how the system works, how to tap into resources,” San Diego Police Capt. George Saldamando said. “I’m very excited about what has happened so far. There’s a can-do attitude, an upbeat mood that says not to settle for anything less than the best.”